At ThirdEye, we love office plants. What started as the first decor in our first small office has turned into an aspect of our company culture full of symbolism and pride. Every time a new team member joins, or a new client visits our office for the first time, we make a stop into Forest London so that they can pick out their very own ThirdEye office plant. Each plant is a reminder that when you give care and attention to our team and our clients, the effort is beautifully rewarded.
Amid the business chaos of adjusting to working during a global pandemic, our dozens of plants were suddenly deprived of their normal caretakers that are in-tune with their watering and care needs. Instead, they were left in the hapless blackthumbed hands of yours truly. While I tried my best for the first couple weeks to ensure that each plant was watered regularly – I soon learned that a one-size fits all approach to plant watering combined with less regulated office temperatures was not faring well for our flora friends. With nobody knowing when we might be able to return to our offices as normal, the team was all very concerned for the wellbeing of their plants, and as we’re reading in the news, we were not alone with this concern.
We had our business problem. We needed a way to better monitor the state of our potted pals, and figure out how we can enable someone that is clueless about plant care (me) to give these plants the love and care they require. Now, after brainstorming with the talented tech team at ThirdEye, we have our solution, Project Vita.
With Project Vita, we will solve the plant problem the way we know best – by putting to use market leading technologies. Each plant will be equipped with a wireless sensor that feeds data to a Raspberry Pi, at which point Mulesoft will take regularly scheduled and instant reads of plant data and feed it into the Salesforce IoT Orchestration. From there, we will be using Salesforce Service Cloud to raise cases when our plants fall below the moisture threshold for the plant species as well as alert us if sunlight or temperature conditions are not optimal. Einstein Analytics will give us insights from the history of sensor readings – and that is just the start.
While we realize this is a somewhat frivolous application of technology, Project Vita will serve as a fully functional demonstration on how IoT Orchestration can be combined with the already powerful features of their Salesforce technology stack in a way that will help them solve problems preventively and with greater accuracy. As we go down this journey, we will be sharing regular project updates, success stories and horror stories. Welcome to Project Vita, we hope you will follow it with us and we would love to hear your ideas!
Project Vita’s chapters:
- Chapter 2 – The Quest for Data
- Chapter 3 – Choosing Scalable Salesforce Tools
- Chapter 4 – Retrieving Data with a Scalable Sensor Solution
